A case study of WHO EQUIP - A multilingual platform for scaling quality mental health support in low-income settings, currently used in 20+ countries.

EQUIP (Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support) is a newly launched project from the World Health Organization & UNICEF that uses Drupal to deliver mental health support training and assessment for low and middle-income settings with low connectivity.

EQUIP is currently in use in over 20 different countries and 4 languages, through 20+ implementation partners including War Child Holland, Uganda Ministry of Health, Socios en Salud (Peru), and Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Nepal.

Working together with George Washington University, WHO, and UNICEF, we designed and developed a successful digital platform for training & assessing mental health support workers, based on their original, more arduous, paper-based methodology. We managed this during a global pandemic and adapted solutions for remote trainings and supervision in the field.

In this session, we will share a whole-project case study, including:
- The background to this project, including end-user needs and the specific context of languages, device requirements, and connectivity.
- Why a Drupal PWA (Progressive Web App) was a good fit for the technical implementation of the EQUIP platform.
- How we used Human-Centered Design (HCD) to define the concept, design and prioritisation of features for the platform.
- How we pivoted at the start of the Covid crisis to release a microsite on remote support delivery within 2 weeks.
- The process of feature prioritization with a large and diverse stakeholder group.
- A tour through the tech stack for, including Drupal modules and decoupled elements.
- How our approach to DevOps and CI (Continuous Integration), and adherence to specific best practices helped us speed up progress and prevent development dead-ends.
- Our progression through from MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for the research phase and the following iterations to public launch in April 2022.
- Designing and building out the administration platform for translations, to minimize work for translators.
- Technical implementation choices through the project. - How we evaluated and tested each step.
- Real-life impacts: How EQUIP is being used in different countries, for varying mental health interventions, by a wide range of organizations.
- Learnings for other large-scale, multilingual projects.
- What’s next for EQUIP: Future plans for expansion

EQUIP has been featured in the Scientific American as an example of new ways of using technology to help fill the gaps in global mental health support provision, and is the subject of multiple academic articles and research papers, as well as being listed on MH Innovation - A global network of mental health innovators.

This session will be presented by Elise West (WHO Human-Centered Designer and EQUIP project lead), and Anthony Fox-Davies (SystemSeed CEO).